Delve, Sway, Planner - the changing face of Office365
June 28 marked the 5 year Anniversary of Microsoft Office365.
Office365 combined Microsoft's core user productivity apps - Microsoft Office and the associated back end services, Exchange, Sharepoint and OCS/Lync into a bundle that enterprises could consume to provide that functionality in a by-the-user subscription model.
By providing capabilities like 50GB Mailboxes and integration with on-premise services, along with the by-the-user pricing model, Enterprises saw real value and began migrating in droves.
Over the last 5 years, Office365 has become a multi-billion dollar line of business for Microsoft and has effectively replaced the traditional on-premise model that effectively drove the careers of many an IT professional and well as sold a ton of compute, storage and networking gear and licenses.
While in the early days of Office365 there were some very notable outages that drove a lot of press, today the service is pretty much as you would expect from a modern cloud based service - rock solid.
While Exchange services are pretty much the same as they were five years ago, meaning, you used Outlook and had an online Exchange back end - changes have started to emerge around SharePoint and Storage.
For many customers they had a love/hate relationship with SharePoint. While the ability to introduce Enterprise, Team and Individual "sites" was cool, they ran into SharePoint sprawl, with thousands of sites, data all over the place and folks not very comfortable using it.
Then came new offerings from competitors like DropBox and Box which were cloud storage offerings that would allow easy sharing across multiple users across any domain. Microsoft countered that trend with OneDrive which is now a part of Office365.
Additionally MS started the integration of Azure and Office365. First came Azure Active Directory, which addressed a huge problem with identity management and also provided a Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) capability that many Enterprises require.
Next came PowerBI which introduced a consumable business intelligence capability without the need to build specialized backend services to support it. I've written about the most recent version and it's a great tool for providing dashboard style reporting and graphics of key business data not only from internal sources, but also external like SalesForce.
Recently, MS has introduced new apps to O365 that are the beginnings in my belief of a fundamental change to what we think of as the Office platform and how teams will work going forward.
First is Sway. Sway is a modern tool for developing and sharing presentation content. So kind of PowerPoint on steroids. As any one who has worked on presentations knows, getting a modern look and flow is not easy in PowerPoint especially when your trying to work from traditional corporate templates.
Additionally adding live external content and media was painful. Plus once you got there on PowerPoint you often then ended up with this huge multi megabit file that was difficult to share let alone look correct or even be usable across multiple platforms. Sway changes all that. I'm not going to get into all the how-to in this post, but I can recommend that you try it. It will make you rethink what a presentation can be and get you away from death by Powerpoint.
Next is Delve. Delve is a new UI for presenting content stored in either Sharepoint or OneDrive. One of the challenges with tools like SharePoint or OneDrive is that you can end up with content shotgunned over a number of sites, folders, etc. Delve provides you with a consolidated view of the that content and is what I think of as a modern my site UI. In addition it adds some team views, so you can see what other members of your team are also working on that they have shared. Delve takes a little getting used to at first and in my mind is missing one key aspect which is the incorporation of presence and real time communication. Even though Delve is in effect a SharePoint app - tools like Delve may be the beginning of the end for traditional SharePoint as we know it.
Finally there is Planner. One of the pet peeves I have with Office365 is that two key apps are not automatically included in the high level Enterprise subscriptions and that is Project and Visio. Often you have to jump through some corporate procurement hoops to get those key tools. Planner at least addresses one - Project. Planner takes Project from being a file based tool with detailed task lists, Gantt charts, etc and turns it into a on-line service that teams can use to organize efforts, assign tasks, attach content and show progress. Let's call it a less formal view of Project.
There are additional new tools coming as well. One example is Flow - an "if this then that" (IFTTT) workflow application which are becoming popular.
Bottom line is this, there is more to Office365 today than just Office, Exchange, SharePoint and Skype and some on these new apps are pretty cool. The competition is also heating up. There are new startups out there that are changing the way that teams work, share data and content online, like Slack. The days of just emailing docs around is ending.
Microsoft needs to continue to advance the Offce365 value proposition to keep up. Apps like Sway, Delve and Planner are a start and I expect that by the end of the decade, these new types of online collaboration and teaming apps will be the normal way of working.
Office365 combined Microsoft's core user productivity apps - Microsoft Office and the associated back end services, Exchange, Sharepoint and OCS/Lync into a bundle that enterprises could consume to provide that functionality in a by-the-user subscription model.
By providing capabilities like 50GB Mailboxes and integration with on-premise services, along with the by-the-user pricing model, Enterprises saw real value and began migrating in droves.
Over the last 5 years, Office365 has become a multi-billion dollar line of business for Microsoft and has effectively replaced the traditional on-premise model that effectively drove the careers of many an IT professional and well as sold a ton of compute, storage and networking gear and licenses.
While in the early days of Office365 there were some very notable outages that drove a lot of press, today the service is pretty much as you would expect from a modern cloud based service - rock solid.
While Exchange services are pretty much the same as they were five years ago, meaning, you used Outlook and had an online Exchange back end - changes have started to emerge around SharePoint and Storage.
For many customers they had a love/hate relationship with SharePoint. While the ability to introduce Enterprise, Team and Individual "sites" was cool, they ran into SharePoint sprawl, with thousands of sites, data all over the place and folks not very comfortable using it.
Then came new offerings from competitors like DropBox and Box which were cloud storage offerings that would allow easy sharing across multiple users across any domain. Microsoft countered that trend with OneDrive which is now a part of Office365.
Additionally MS started the integration of Azure and Office365. First came Azure Active Directory, which addressed a huge problem with identity management and also provided a Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) capability that many Enterprises require.
Next came PowerBI which introduced a consumable business intelligence capability without the need to build specialized backend services to support it. I've written about the most recent version and it's a great tool for providing dashboard style reporting and graphics of key business data not only from internal sources, but also external like SalesForce.
Recently, MS has introduced new apps to O365 that are the beginnings in my belief of a fundamental change to what we think of as the Office platform and how teams will work going forward.
First is Sway. Sway is a modern tool for developing and sharing presentation content. So kind of PowerPoint on steroids. As any one who has worked on presentations knows, getting a modern look and flow is not easy in PowerPoint especially when your trying to work from traditional corporate templates.
Additionally adding live external content and media was painful. Plus once you got there on PowerPoint you often then ended up with this huge multi megabit file that was difficult to share let alone look correct or even be usable across multiple platforms. Sway changes all that. I'm not going to get into all the how-to in this post, but I can recommend that you try it. It will make you rethink what a presentation can be and get you away from death by Powerpoint.
Next is Delve. Delve is a new UI for presenting content stored in either Sharepoint or OneDrive. One of the challenges with tools like SharePoint or OneDrive is that you can end up with content shotgunned over a number of sites, folders, etc. Delve provides you with a consolidated view of the that content and is what I think of as a modern my site UI. In addition it adds some team views, so you can see what other members of your team are also working on that they have shared. Delve takes a little getting used to at first and in my mind is missing one key aspect which is the incorporation of presence and real time communication. Even though Delve is in effect a SharePoint app - tools like Delve may be the beginning of the end for traditional SharePoint as we know it.
Finally there is Planner. One of the pet peeves I have with Office365 is that two key apps are not automatically included in the high level Enterprise subscriptions and that is Project and Visio. Often you have to jump through some corporate procurement hoops to get those key tools. Planner at least addresses one - Project. Planner takes Project from being a file based tool with detailed task lists, Gantt charts, etc and turns it into a on-line service that teams can use to organize efforts, assign tasks, attach content and show progress. Let's call it a less formal view of Project.
There are additional new tools coming as well. One example is Flow - an "if this then that" (IFTTT) workflow application which are becoming popular.
Bottom line is this, there is more to Office365 today than just Office, Exchange, SharePoint and Skype and some on these new apps are pretty cool. The competition is also heating up. There are new startups out there that are changing the way that teams work, share data and content online, like Slack. The days of just emailing docs around is ending.
Microsoft needs to continue to advance the Offce365 value proposition to keep up. Apps like Sway, Delve and Planner are a start and I expect that by the end of the decade, these new types of online collaboration and teaming apps will be the normal way of working.
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